Hana Kloutvorová: Personal deixis in the speech of characters in shōjo manga 1. Introduction There can be no doubts that shōjo manga (Japanese comics aimed at a teenage girl readership) are remaining one of popular forms of entertainment for many Japanese – for example, in the time period from July to September 2014 almost 1,7 million copies of various shōjo manga magazines were published1. Additionally, in a survey from 2008 around 45% of respondents believed that manga affects the language of younger generations and that manga is also a reason for higher frequency of occurrence of masculine personal pronouns in the speech of young girls (Unser-Schutz 2011, 216). In my dissertation thesis, I will examine the usage of Japanese personal pronouns …show more content…
Satoshi Kinsui developed the concept of stereotypization occurring in the virtual language through the role language: the language in the media is a image of actual language, it is a fictional language (Kinsui 2003, 32). To use the most natural language possible in the speech of fictional characters, certain amount of text is needed, but due to economization of the text it can be done only in the case of major characters. In the case of minor characters, it is easier for reader 's perception to categorize characters by a language features that are associated with a certain type of character (Kinsui, Teshigawara 2011, s. 37). To state it simply, if there is a script, stereotyping necessarily occurs – “when scripted, characters’ speech styles are often framed by their given ideological roles. That is, through their speech styles, characters in scripted speech are commonly made identifiable with subgroups to which they belong according to certain expectations based on linguistic ideology” (Hiramoto 2013, 51-52). Yakuwarigo is not a mirror of reality (Kinsui 2003, 38), readers are aware that real speakers do not speak the role language (Kinsui, Teshigawara 2011, s. 38). Women 's language is also one of the means of a language